The Weeping Women Hotel (19 page)

It was
her turn to ponder in silence before saying, ‘Angry, powerless, humiliated, it
was like you were insulting me.’

‘And
now you’ve come up here and you’ve faced us, told us of your righteous anger …’

Harriet
thought for a further few seconds then laughed, raising her arms and letting
them flop to her side. ‘I don’t care any more.’

The old
man smiled too. ‘Of course you don’t! Because it wasn’t the rubbish that was making
you angry but your own weakness. Now you’ve faced us without fear, you’ve done
what you can and we are no longer a faceless enemy — you know us now a little.
I hope in future you can come and visit us many times, neighbour, and tell us
of the many ways in which we are annoying you.’

‘And
does that mean, now we’re friends, that you’re going to stop piling your
rubbish across my door?’

‘No, of
course not.’

‘Oh.’

‘Let me
introduce myself, I am Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro; my name reflects the
polyglot nature of our beloved
Namibia
. The names of these others,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely in
the direction of the young men, ‘do not matter.’

‘Harriet
Tingle,’ she said.

‘Wait a
second, Harriet Tingle …‘ He spoke in what she thought must have been Swahili
to one of the young men who immediately left to return a few seconds later
clutching something small which he gave to the head man.

‘Here,
now we are good neighbours, I have a gift for you. ‘Then, leaning forward, and
taking her hand in his own he placed something in Harriet’s palm then folded
her fingers over it. When she looked down she saw that they now held her
mother’s brooch.

Toby typed ‘surplus
computer leads’ into his Brother P-Touch 2000 Label Maker then pressed the
‘Print’ button. He watched as the slender label spooled out of the machine,
next he chopped off the label with the built-in guillotine and peeling off the
sticky back stuck it on to the front of a drawer in his office desk filled with
leads for various obsolete computers that would never ever be used again.

Then he
sat back wondering what to do next. One thing about being a drunk, empty hours
had never been a problem when he drank because of course you filled them with
being drunk. You never had to think what to do when you were out of your head
and every decision you made seemed brilliant at the time though not necessarily
afterwards. Sure his life was better in many ways now: he had his Brother
P-Touch 2000 Label Maker for a start which he loved more than nearly anything
else. He loved the Brother P-Touch 2000 Label Maker so much that he kept one at
home and another here in his office, though he’d never told each about the
other’s existence in case they got jealous. Toby loved to figure out exactly
what a thing was, then label it —already that morning he’d done the separate
shelves in his cupboard, ‘Rejection Letters’ he’d printed out in rather nice
black on silver, then switching to black outline on white he’d typed ‘Refusal
Letters’ and ‘Lost Research Application Form Letters’.

Then
just as suddenly his fragile, happy mood dissipated; it occurred to Toby that
if he could just figure out what precisely his feelings were for his
sister-in-law and label them, then maybe he’d feel a bit less miserable such a
lot of the time. He had no doubt that his recent agitation was connected with
the sudden and unexpected alteration in Harriet’s appearance: who’d have
thought Big Fat Hat was a stunner underneath all that blubber? Then perhaps the
label should read ‘Confused Feelings Created by Relative’s Sudden and
Unexpected Beauty’.

Looking
back, Toby realised that he’d succeeded for quite a long time in deliberately
not noticing what was happening to Helen’s sister but when she’d come round to
the house to babysit the other night, when she’d done that little turn in front
of him in their hallway, turning and twisting her wonderful body, he could no
longer ignore the fact that over the last few months his sister-in-law had gone
from being a huge fat ugly blob to someone who was on their way to looking
absolutely ravishing. He’d genuinely thought he was going to faint in the hall
like a Victorian lady.

So
maybe the label should be ‘Sexual Desire for Close Relative Like in Family on
Leeds Council Estate’. It wasn’t just her appearance though. That was only a
part of it, though certainly her features were beautiful — her caramel skin
flawless, her eyes sparkling and bright, her black hair lustrous — but more
than that there was a wild brave energy about her now so that it seemed as if
her whole body was lit up from inside with a powerful lamp.

Toby
thought mournfully to himself that you could say he’d been uniquely unlucky:
‘Unique Situation — Not Your Fault At All’ might be a good label for the
situation. What he meant was that he loved the way his wife looked, it was her
remarkable beauty that he’d fallen for in the first place, but then that was
sort of the problem because suddenly he’d been presented with a taller, fitter,
less smug, more amusing, more intelligent replica of his wife. How many times did
that happen? It was like when Porsche brought out a new car that sort of looked
like the car they’d been making before but was better in every way: bigger
engine, twin turbos, electronic traction control, fifty airbags, MP3 player.
He’d often thought that if you’d bought the old car just before the new one
came out you’d be really pissed off. Well, that’s what had happened to him:
he’d been stuck with last year’s Porsche and the payments would last for
another fifty years.

It
occurred to Toby that Helen’s beauty wasn’t her, it wasn’t her nature, it was
just a thing she possessed. Her beauty had made her seem wonderful to him but
now he wondered whether he’d been looking at his wife for eight years without
actually seeing the personality underneath it. All of a sudden he wasn’t sure
whether she was a nice person or not. The way when she came into a room she
acted like she was doing it a favour, for example. Harriet didn’t do that.
Harriet was like Helen but because she hadn’t been pretty all her life she wasn’t
so extraordinarily full of herself. Harriet didn’t feel that people should
just pay attention to her without her saying or doing anything the least bit
interesting ever.

Then
his emotions did a handbrake turn and his mind was flooded with what he thought
was a sudden and overwhelming love for his wife and what certainly was a great
pity for himself.

How
could he say these terrible things to himself about Helen? She was the
loveliest thing in his life, she was a brilliant mother and a devoted wife, a successful
career woman. Instead, massive feelings of resentment towards Harriet engulfed
him. What was she doing suddenly changing like that? He’d been happy before and
now he wasn’t and he could date his unhappiness from the point where he’d
noticed the difference in Harriet’s appearance, so that proved him being
unhappy and mad was his sister-in-law’s fault.

Toby
knew he was definitely unhappy and mad because the voices, the tics, the
mannerisms had got worse. He wasn’t sure but he was worried that he’d started
yelling stuff out without knowing he was doing it. On the tube or somewhere
else public he’d drift off on a train of thought about his problems, trying to
figure out what was bothering him and what to do about it, then suddenly he
would sort of return to his body to find all the other passengers staring at
him and the faint echo of a demented sound ringing in the air.

He’d
started to see sex everywhere too, struggling to hide sudden erections in a way
he hadn’t since he was a teenager. The few centimetres of flesh that girls
began to expose at this time of year sent his mind boiling. In his calmer
moments he feared that there was going to be a generation of young girls who
were going to have terrible kidney problems in later life due to the delicious
little slivers of skin on their rounded stomachs and curved lower backs that
they showed off to the frigid air. Not to mention a generation of sexually
deranged middle-aged men.

In
addition he feared he might be revealing the turmoil going on inside his head
to Helen. The previous evening they had been watching television.

‘Allons
enfants de la Patrie
…‘ Toby sang as usual as the
theme music for the main news bulletin faded then abruptly he couldn’t stop
himself shouting, ‘Another bloody pregnant weather girl!’

‘What?’
Helen asked, looking up from her magazine.

‘That
girl there doing the weather, she’s pregnant! Lots of them are, newsreaders,
traffic women, weather girls, they’re always up the duff one after another. I
bet there’s all these satanic orgies once they’re off the air. All these young
dollies naked, spread out in an X shape and Michael Fish going round dressed as
a goat impregnating them.’

‘I
think Michael Fish has retired.’

‘Well,
some other weatherman then!’

‘What’s
the matter with you?’ Helen asked.

‘Nothing,
well, I dunno, maybe I do feel a bit funny.’

She
said, ‘Maybe you need to get more exercise, like my sister.’

‘Yeah,
exercise!’ he gurgled. ‘That’s the thing! Like your sister!’

Finally
alone in his office he picked up his Brother P-Touch 2000 and slowly tapped
into the keyboard, ‘Bloke — Completely Fucked by Impossible Situation’. Then he
printed out the label, peeled off the backing and stuck it to his forehead.

7

Years ago in her late
twenties, Harriet had owned a little Morris Minor convertible car. That’s who
she thought she was back then, a big fat girl, huge tinted brown glasses,
crocheted poncho, knitted hat on her head, driving around in a comedy clown car
with the pram top down, parp! parp! Had loved that dumpy little car though.
Since it was a fragile classic, unsafe on the streets, ‘Marcus’ had to be kept
parked in a lock-up garage, one of about ten built around a square on a piece
of land alongside the railway tracks on the other side of the little railway
station. One day, intending to take a drive to
Suffolk
to attend a concert at the Henry Moore sculpture centre, on turning
into the garages she found her way blocked, disorientatingly, by a big caravan
with net curtains and pottery shepherd and shepherdess figurines in the window.
What had happened was that during the night several families of travellers had
parked their caravans on the square. Every metal door of the garages had been
ripped open and the cars inside had already been gutted down to their entrails.
As she came to where her Morris Minor was parked a traveller child was crouched
defecating inside it.

Staring
open-mouthed at this violation of her property, she was filled with the
familiar feelings of impotent anger and rage that she felt most days but she
was also surprised to detect a hungry sense of envy that fizzled alongside it.
She thought that to be so careless of the feelings and property of others must
be a wonderful thing’ — such freedom! Harriet imagined that nobody in those
caravans kept a list of all their friends’ and acquaintances’ hat, shoe and
ring sizes so they could buy them the perfect anniversary present, none of
those travellers had ever biked anybody over an extra large muffin basket, not
one of those tinkers had ever spent all day carving a birthday card out of a
potato. Of course the travellers didn’t have friends and acquaintances: they
only had their tribe and anybody outside it could go get fucked but they seemed
happy enough with that. In the past she’d been obsessed with not upsetting not
just the people who were important to her but total strangers as well. That
situation was changing — since starting Li Kuan Yu Harriet seemed to care a
good deal less about the opinions of others: she wasn’t yet with those
travellers ripping open people’s lockups and shitting in their cars but
sometimes she thought she was getting there.

Remembering her little
Marcus (whom she’d never been able to look at again no matter how many times
he’d been steam cleaned) made her think that it was time to get a new car. Up
until then, Old Fat Harriet had owned a bland little beige hatchback made in
Malaysia and called something like a WeeWee One Point One SPLX, which she
always drove as if she was taking her driving test right there and then. This
sad, self-effacing little vehicle did not in any way suit New Thin Harriet, so
one day in March she part-exchanged it for a big silver Japanese 4 x 4 pick-up
truck with a crew cab. She wasn’t sure how she’d be able to manage the finance
payments on this enormous thing — but New Thin Harriet put the problem out of
her mind. Being careful with money, paying off your credit card every month,
watching the pennies, buying reasonably priced food down the street market
rather than grabbing expensive delicacies in tiny jars and tins from all-night
delis, seemed like the sort of thing a big, ugly, fat girl would do.

The
truck she drove as if she was a character appearing in a film, swiftly and with
confidence, often not looking for a parking space but simply leaving it outside
wherever she was going just as they did in the movies. One day in north
London
picking up some material for a
repair, Harriet parked her truck on a patch of waste land, a decommissioned
petrol station awaiting redevelopment, conveniently sited opposite her
destination. Returning twenty minutes later she found a battered green metal
clamp attached to the front wheel along with a sticker demanding one hundred
and fifty-eight pounds for somebody to come along to remove it.